New provisions of the 2022 Building Safety Act came into force on 1st April 2023. These include a duty to keep the safety and standard of buildings under review, facilitating improvement in the competence of industry and building inspectors, and a duty to establish a system for the giving of building safety information.
Full implementation of the Act is due by October 2023. So, those responsible for the safety of high-rise buildings in England must register with the new Building Safety Regulator and have their building safety regime in place by this time, or face investigation and potential prosecution.
But what are the recommended methods to create an effective building safety regime in higher-risk environments such as high-rise? The ‘golden thread’ approach was outlined by Dame Judith Hackett in her report, ‘Building a safer future’.
The ‘golden thread’ is a tool to manage buildings as holistic systems, and allow people to use information to safely and effectively design, construct and operate their buildings. It is both the information that allows you to understand a building, and the steps needed to keep both the building and people safe, now and in the future.
Paul Thompson, BIM manager at ASSA ABLOY Opening Solution, explains: “There has been some progress made in the built environment towards achieving positive changes in culture, and the introduction of the new Building Safety Act provisions and Building Safety Regulator registration should help to accelerate change at a faster rate.
“BIM has the ability to create greater transparency and produce this ‘golden thread’ of information, allowing building elements such as doorsets to be managed through a single platform – from specification to installation and ongoing inspection.
“BIM applications also help to lock in positive behaviours from the very start of a project and support an increase in trust and confidence that safety is paramount throughout a building’s specification, construction and maintenance.”
Using BIM
With this in mind, ASSA ABLOY’s Openings Studio™ BIM application integrates with design software to create and visualise openings for complete door, frame and hardware schedules and specifications.
This enables seamless extraction of door design intent and all relevant interfaces to assist fabricators to develop complete door requirements that meet building regulations.
Product information, performance data and budget information are captured within the BIM design environment. Through real time, collaborative working, these designs can be validated for compliance, functional performance, and aesthetics plus presented as 3D views that can be fully re-integrated into the overall project design.
With linked internal systems, ASSA ABLOY use this final schedule of information to manufacture the complete doorset solution including the leaf, frame and all specified hardware.
Shared data for collaboration
Thompson adds: “This is a unique collaborative tool for all project stakeholders, helping to minimise costs and streamline the data sharing process throughout the entire project lifecycle – from the initial design, right through to construction, delivery, asset management and beyond.”
An extension to Openings Studio™ is now widely used in the industry, which offers a mobile app that directly accesses this data for use during the door installation process, ensuring full validity of the finished product prior to project completion. The app also offers an easy to use ‘check box’ system to carry out and capture detailed inspections based on the specific details of each door included in the schedule.
This report validates if a door has remained compliant, or identifies what elements need to be corrected or replaced to return the product to the standard required, providing full traceability and ownership of all changes at all stages.
This means the doorset is managed as a holistic compliant solution and connects all components through a single platform. This eliminates the risk that doors are pieced together as an assembly of parts from various sources or maintained and repaired as a collection of individual parts.
